I bought a smart phone. I said I would never get one, that I didn't need all those bells and whistles. Just give me a small phone I can stick in my pocket for emergencies.
I was not an early adopter of the cell phone, but when travelling on business I saw how handy it would be to have one with me. Still, I make or receive only about 20 calls a month, hardly worth carrying the damn thing around with me.
So why did I pay $100 plus commit to a 2 year contract to get a fancy phone? Because I finally realized it's not a phone, but a small, fast, pocket-sized computer, easily connected to the Internet, that you can also make phone calls with.
Within an hour of taking it out of the box I knew I had hit home run with this decision. The technology is stunning to someone like me who remembers using outhouses and hand-cranked phones with a central operator at my grandmother's house as a kid! So add one more marvel to my list of marvels which contains laptops, Kindles, and now smart phones. What's scary is that 3 years from now this marvel will be a quaint dinosaur, ridiculed by the young. Sigh.
--Trakker
outhouses and hand-cranked phones
Think of the guy who bought the Cray 1 for $3m with $1m/yr programming cost. 100mHz processor, no operating system, no applications.
Your smart phone probably has a 1gHz uP. It probably cost your cell phone company about $600. You get it at a reduced price for taking their 2-year service.
Posted by: horsec | September 09, 2011 at 05:20 PM